Quotes from Edith Wharton

What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe.

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

It did not occur to her that Selden might have been actuated merely by the desire to spend a Sunday out of town: women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.

They belonged to the vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.

Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.

A man has the advantage of being delivered early from the home point of view, and before Selden left for college he had learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as of spending it.

The Fates seldom forget the bargains made with them, or fail to ask for compound interest.

The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred. She admired him most of all, perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever met.

Any personal entanglement might mean bother, and bother was the thing she most abhorred.

But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I've found that a good thing to remember.

She still did and was all that Undine had so sedulously learned not to be and to do; but to dwell on these obstacles to her success was to be more deeply impressed by the fact that she had nevertheless succeeded.